The Living and the Dead in Winsford (2 page)

That was the name I had given him. I don’t know why I had hit upon my mother’s maiden name – perhaps for the simple reason that I was hardly likely to forget it. Anderson with only one ‘s’, which is how they spell it in this country. By means of a simple hand gesture Mr Tawking indicated that I was welcome to step inside, and we each sat down in an armchair by a low, dark wooden table in front of an artificial gas fire. A teapot, two cups, a plate of biscuits, that was all. Apart from two keys on a ring lying on top of a sheet of paper, which I gathered was the rental contract. He served tea, stroked Castor and invited him to lie down in front of the warm fire. Castor did as he was bid, and it was obvious that Mr Tawking was used to dealing with dogs. But I could see no sign of one at the moment: Mr Tawking was old and hunched, certainly well over eighty – perhaps he had had a four-legged friend that died recently, and perhaps he had felt it was too late to acquire a new one. Dogs should not outlive their owners, that was a conclusion I had recently come round to.

‘Six months from yesterday,’ said Mr Tawking. ‘From the first of November until the end of April. So there we are – don’t blame me!’

He attempted to smile, but his muscles were not quite able to follow his intentions. Maybe it was a long time since he had anything to feel pleased about: there was an ingrained sense of melancholy enveloping both him and the room in which we were sitting. Maybe it was not just a dog that had left him, I thought, but a wife as well. Wives ought usually to outlive their husbands, but that is quite a different matter and not something I had any desire to think about in the present circumstances, certainly not. Instead I noted that the fitted carpet was dirty and worn in places; there were patches of damp on the gaudily patterned wallpaper, and for some strange reason a piece of red tape was stuck to the top right-hand corner of the television screen. I felt an urge to get out of here as quickly as possible. My own feelings of impending twilight needed no further encouragement, and after less than a quarter of an hour I had signed the contract, paid the agreed price for six months’ rent – £3,000 in cash (plus the £600 I had paid into his account two days ago) – and been given the keys. We had talked about nothing apart from the weather and the practical details.

‘You’ll find an instruction book on the draining board. It’s intended for summer visitors, of course, but if there’s anything else you want to know about just call in or give me a ring. My number is in that book. Be careful when you make a fire.’

‘Will my mobile phone work up there?’

‘That depends on which network you are with. You can always try from the mound on the other side of the road. You can usually get a signal there. The place where that woman is buried, and round about there. Elizabeth.’

We shook hands, he stroked Castor again, and we left him.

The mistress and her dog returned along Ash Lane to the monument and the car. It was becoming windy, gusts lashed and buffeted the larch trees and telephone wires, but the rain held back. The mist meant that visibility was thirty metres at most. There was still no sign of any living creature apart from us. Castor jumped onto his seat in the car, and I gave him another liver treat. We exchanged a few reassuring thoughts, and I did my best to erase the questions in his worried eyes. Then we set off and proceeded carefully along the other road through the village. Halse Lane.

After only fifty metres we passed the village pub. It’s called The Royal Oak Inn, has an impressively thick thatched roof, and faint beams of light shone out of its windows onto the road. Just past it, but on the other side of the road, with gloomy-looking rectangular windows, was Karslake House, a hotel boarded up for the winter.

Then both buildings and street lighting came to an end. The road became even narrower and was barely wide enough to accommodate a single vehicle: but during the seven or eight minutes it took us to reach Darne Lodge, through a series of convoluted and awkward bends, we didn’t meet a single car. Visibility was restricted by high, grassy and stony banks that had evidently been flanking the road for centuries – apart from the final section when the moor suddenly stretched out on all sides, temporarily illuminated by a full moon that succeeded in piercing the clouds and mists for a few seconds. All at once the landscape looked ethereal, like an old painting – Gainsborough or Constable perhaps? Or why not Caspar David Friedrich? Friedrich has always been Martin’s favourite artist: a reproduction of
Monk by the Sea
was hanging on the wall of his office when we first met.

I was struck by an ambivalent feeling of fear and relief when I got out of the car to open the gate. Or perhaps I had been flirting with this same unholy alliance as Friedrich, darkness and light, ever since what happened on that beach just outside Mi
ȩ
dzyzdroje.

Mi
ȩ
dzyzdroje – I still can’t pronounce it properly, but the spelling is correct (apart from the strange accent under the first ‘e’ that I don’t know how to produce): I’ve checked it. Eleven days ago now. A very difficult period of time if ever there was one, but despite everything, the nerve-racking, choking feelings have become slightly less acute for every morning that has passed, and every decision made – at least, I like to think that has been the case.

I have made up my mind to continue thinking that.

And if only I could switch on the electricity, get a fire started and sink a glass or two of port, I would be faced with a sea of tranquillity. Six months of winter and spring on the moor. With no company apart from Castor, my own ageing body and my misguided soul. Each day like every other, every hour impossible to distinguish from the preceding or the subsequent one . . . Ah well, in so far as it was possible to begin to envisage the coming six months, that is more or less how things looked. A hermit’s life of redemption and reflection and God only knows what –but both Castor and I were well aware that we should spare no thought for the morrow, and an hour later, when he was on his sheepskin and I was in a rocking chair in front of the somewhat hesitantly crackling fire, we simply fell asleep, one after the other.

It was the second of November, it is perhaps worth noting: we had travelled further than I could ever have dreamt of and as far as I could judge we had swept away all traces of our movements. Feeling confident and secure that this was the case, shortly before midnight we moved over to the bedroom with its sagging double bed. I lay awake for a while, drawing up a few preliminary and practical plans for the following day. Listening to the wind blowing over the moor, and to the refrigerator humming away in the combined kitchen and living room, and eventually deciding that the events of the last few months had now finally come to an end. Or of the last few years, to be more precise.

And to be even more precise: of my life as it had turned out so far.

2

‘I can understand that you both need to get away from it all,’ Eugen Bergman had said, peering over the rim of his remarkably outdated spectacles. ‘What with that mad woman and all the rest of it. And the literary timing is just about right as well. However it turns out, we shall be able to sell it.’

This is not going to be an account of what has happened in the past, these unstructured notes – no more than what is necessary in order to understand the present. In so far as I have any ambitions at all, that is just about as far as they go. You write – and read – in order to understand things, that’s something I’ve often tried to convince myself about. There is a lot that I shall never understand: recent happenings have proved that more conclusively than I might have wished, but surely one should try to throw a bit of light on things? I’ve started to do that far too late – but you ought to do something while you’re waiting for death to carry you off, as one of my colleagues used to say on particularly bleak Monday mornings at the Monkeyhouse. Although I’m beginning to get confused already, words and times are becoming unclear. Back to Sveavägen in Stockholm, exactly one month ago. Eugen Bergman.

‘However it turns out?’ said Martin, as if he had failed completely to understand the indulgent irony in what the publisher had said. ‘Can I remind you that I’ve been sitting on this material for thirty years. If your bean-counters can’t grasp the value of that, there are bean-counters in other publishing houses who will.’

‘I’ve already said that we shall publish it,’ said Bergman with one of his wry smiles. ‘And you’ll get your advance. What’s the matter with you, old chap? I can assure you it will be translated into seven or eight languages without further ado. They might even put it up for auction in England. Get on your bike, for God’s sake – you have my blessing. And the deadline will be the end of April next year. Mind you, I’d quite like to read bits of it before then, as you know.’

‘Fat chance,’ said Martin, then nodded at me: ‘No bastard gets to read a single word until it’s finished.’

It was time to leave, that was obvious. We’d been no more than ten minutes in the room, but needless to say everything had been prepared meticulously in advance. Bergman has been Martin’s publisher for twenty years, and is one of those old-fashioned, solid-as-a-rock types. That’s what Martin always used to say, in any case. Every new contract – there haven’t been all that many, only six or seven if I remember rightly – has been confirmed in Bergman’s office. Sign on the dotted line, shake hands, then sink a drop or two of amaro from one of the slightly worse-for-wear little glasses he keeps hidden away in one of his desk cupboards: that has always been the routine, and it was the routine that Friday afternoon at the beginning of October as well.

The sixth, to be precise. An Indian summer day if ever there was one, at least in the Stockholm area. I’m not quite sure why Martin had insisted on my being there, but presumably because it was a rather special occasion.

If so, it wasn’t difficult to understand why.

To celebrate the fact that we were still together. That the turbulence of the last few months had not been able to undermine the solid base of our marriage. That I stood behind my husband, or wherever it was that an independent but good wife was expected to stand. By his side, perhaps?

And I admit that ‘insisted’ is not the right word. Martin had asked me to be present, that was all. Eugen Bergman has been a good friend of both of us for many years, even if we haven’t actually been socializing together very much since the death of his wife, Lydia, in 2007. So it was not the first time I had visited that messy office of his in Sveavägen. By no means, and on most of my visits we had drunk a few drops of amaro.

When we left the publisher’s Martin announced that he had several other meetings booked in, and suggested that we should meet at Sturehof about six o’clock. Although if I preferred to go straight home I could have the car, as taking the commuter train was no problem as far as he was concerned. I said that I had already arranged to meet this Violetta di Parma who was going to stay in our house while we were away – something he ought to have known as I had mentioned it in the car on the way to town that morning – and that Sturehof at six o’clock would be fine for me.

He nodded somewhat absent-mindedly, gave me a quick hug then continued walking along Sveavägen in the direction of Sergels Torg. For some reason I remained standing there on the pavement, watching him weaving his way through the crowds of unknown people, and I remember thinking that if I hadn’t happened to get pregnant when we spent Christmas with his awful parents thirty-three years ago, my life would have turned out differently from the way it did. So would his.

But that was a thought about as banal as an itchy finger, and it lacked significance or comfort.

I enrolled in the Department of Literary History in the autumn term of 1976. I was nineteen, and my boyfriend and first love Rolf enrolled at the same time. I studied literature for two terms, and I might have continued longer if Rolf hadn’t been killed in an accident the following summer, although I can’t be certain of that. I kept feeling at regular intervals that studying literary texts through a magnifying glass was not my true calling, and although I passed the exams without much difficulty – albeit without achieving top marks – I convinced myself that there were alternative arenas in which my life could take place. Or however you might like to express it.

Rolf ’s death was naturally a crucial factor. He was the one of us who had been a bookworm enthralled by literature. He was the one who would recite Rilke and Larkin at night after six glasses of wine, he was the one who took me to seminars organized by the Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund – the Workers’ Educational Association, or the ABF as it was called – and the Asynja book club, and he was the one who would spend the last few kronor he possessed on half a dozen second-hand copies of Ahlin, Dagerman and Sandemose at Rönnell’s antiquarian bookshop rather than ensuring that we had enough to eat over the weekend. We never got as far as pooling our financial resources – and if we had done it would certainly not have been without its problems.

But in the middle of August 1977, Rolf fell to his death fifty metres down a cliff in Switzerland, and so we never got round to considering such a venture. I abandoned my literary studies and after a few months of mourning, during which I spent part of the time living with my parents and the rest working as a night receptionist at a hotel in Kungsholmen, I signed up for a sort of media studies course at Gärdet in January, and that was the direction my career took. I was given a job by Swedish Television eighteen months later, and that was my workplace until three months ago – apart from two sessions of maternity leave and an occasional project at some other institution.

It feels odd, being able to sum up one’s life so simply; but if you miss out your childhood and all the things you thought were so important at the time, it’s straightforward.

Barely a year after Rolf ’s death I went to a garden party in the Old Town. It was the middle of July 1978. I somewhat reluctantly accompanied one of my fellow students on the media studies course, and that was the evening when I met Martin. I was the one who was reluctant, not my fellow student, and that had been the way of things throughout the year. I was not in mourning for just one death, but for two. An old one and a new one – I shall come back to that later – and dealing with one’s sorrow is by no means a simple matter.